THE NEW YOR.KER. comfort we accept evil, and even vote for the mechanism of its functioning. When out of fear or consideration of comfort we support this mechanism of evil, we have no right to condemn it, for we contribute to it and help to legalize evil. Elsewhere in that hom- ily Father Popieluszko preached that it is "a dis- service to truth" for a government "to rely on naked power and on shows of strength." He went on to say, "Physical power is a lie, because it destroys what it purports to defend. Good government requires re- nunciation of violence and mendacity. This is the road to peace and to frui tful construction. But peace cannot be taken to mean forcing people to be silent." Well, now Father Popieluszko has been forced into silence, though the Polish government is doing its best to dodge blame for the forcing. There is a great deal of confusion. It is conceivable, for example, that no one intended the priest's death, that his kidnappers merely wanted to scare him, rough him up a bit-only (perhaps unknown to them) he was a hemophiliac and things got out of hand. Such a scenario conforms with at least four incidents earlier this year in Torun, the town near which Father Popieluszko was seized while he was on an automobile journey. In each of these, according to the local underground journal T 0- runski Informator Solidarnosci (quoted in the April 20, 1984, issue of the New York-based Committee in Sup- port of Solidarity Reports), "unknown perpetrators, using police-issued hand- cuffs, abducted [their victims] and terrorized them with severe beatings," and the account continued, "Death threats were issued against them, their families, children, or spouses. The perpetrators had expensive resources at their disposal such as cars, country houses, and vacation resorts." In at least one case, a leaflet was stuffed in the bag of a battered but mercifully still breathing victim which an- nounced the formation of "the Anti- Solidarity Organization." The leaflet stated, "The feckless group of J a- ruzelski and the bureaucratized securi- ty-police services cannot overcome the cancer consuming our society-con- ---- --......--..... ------ .... --." #I- --- -- ð:: ---- " ------- . ' , \ , , . \, L . spiracy and fashionable opposition at- titudes. Solidarity is such a cancer. . . . The war has begun. . . . Beware. For the time being, we only give warning of what we are capable of." At the time of these incidents, the local un- derground committee in T orun issued a statement wondering, "What is the point of such nightmares? Is it to intimidate all of us, so that no one ever feels safe? Or, per haps, to pro- voke counter-terror from us, so that they can justify the existence of a monstrously swollen apparatus of co- ercion, an apparatus that, thus far, has not been able to take pride in its extraordinary effectiveness? Perhaps both. However, this does not change the fact that the authorities or some elements among them have adopted a new tactic: open and uncamouflaged terror. Before our eyes, in Central Eu- rope, Central American methods are beginning to be used." This prior history, at any rate, lends a certain credibility to the claims now being advanced by Jerzy Urban, the principal spokesman for the regime of General W ojciech ]aruzelski, that the arrested security-police agents were in fact acting on their own, or in concert wIth other renegade elements, in an attempt to embarrass J aruzelski and other self-styled moderates in the regime. According to this version, there are hard -line neo- Fascist ele- 41 J$J LfJJ l! i?-- \ (. ---JJ ....., , ",0 / o () 0 t1 IV, A. f'V . ments, particularly in the Party and the nonmilitary security services, who are growing increasingly frustrated by their continuing suspension from the centers of real power and by the persis- tence of a thriving underground cul- ture, symbolized by Father Popieluszko and coddled, or so they imagine, by ] aruzelski's too lenient social policies (most recently, the July amnesty). These elements supposedly saw an op- portunity both to eliminate Pop ie- luszko and to provoke the kind of pub- lic reaction-rage and rioting in the streets-that might force Jaruzelski to impose the kind of absolutist discipline they had in mind or else face ouster by his Soviet overlords, who would presumably then turn to them as loyal successors. (It should be noted that the hard-liners seem to have a longtime stronghold in this north-central re- gion of Poland and a history of such provocations: it was only thirty miles from T orun, and in the same security district, that in March, 1981, police troopers in Bydgoszcz violently as- saulted a peaceful gathering and se- verely wounded three Solidarity lead- ers, thereby precipitating far and away the most dangerous crisis in the entire sixteen-month aboveground history of the. union. ) This is the sort of convoluted ex- planation and self-exoneration that Urban and ] aruzelskI and the other